


an oral history of the 2019 major league baseball juiced ball dingerfest

by ohtempora



Category: An Oral History Of The 1998 Major League Baseball Home Run Chase (ClickHole Article), Baseball RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Birds, Gen, Satire, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21857959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohtempora/pseuds/ohtempora
Summary: Randy Johnson (photographer; member, Baseball Hall of Fame):Rob Manfred found me somehow. I don’t know how. I thought, 20 years ago, it had been enough. I was in my backyard taking some photos of birds and Rob stood on my deck and said, “Randy, you have to help us out with a project,” and I said, “I will only help you if it’s a photography project, Rob, I am retired now, you can go to my website to look at my photos,” and Rob said, “if you didn’t want to help us, you shouldn’t have given up that goddamn moonshot to McGwire.”
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	an oral history of the 2019 major league baseball juiced ball dingerfest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayhap](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayhap/gifts).

> happy yuletide, mayhap!! i genuinely enjoyed your letter and, of course, the clickhole article this fic is about. 
> 
> 110% absolutely none of this will make sense unless you read [this](https://lifestyle.clickhole.com/an-oral-history-of-the-1998-major-league-baseball-home-1825121240) delightful clickhole article, which i tried my very best to be true to.

** _In 2017, everyone on the internet agreed: baseball wasn’t back. Baseball was boring. Even though the previous year the Cubs broke their 108 year curse, to the chagrin of several billy goats in the Chicago metro area, it didn’t matter. Labor unrest was sparking, straining the relationship between players and owners. The nerds were ruining the game, people said. Or stodgy old baseball men were ruining the game. Or, maybe, Joe Buck was ruining the game. Either way you put it: baseball was in trouble, just like it had been two decades before. _ **

** _This is the story of a few men and how they tried to fix it. It is also a story of a scandal. Well, a couple of scandals. The whole Astros thing really did happen, and the Red Sox with the Apple Watches, and maybe even some more stuff. But this isn’t the story about those scandals. For the first time ever, the masterminds behind the late-2010s juiced ball mystery describe what really happened. _ **

** _This is a story about a fuckload of dingers, and slightly too many birds. _ **

** _This is is the oral history of the home run explosion. _ **

**Chapter 1: Baseball in Peril**

**Rob Manfred (commissioner, MLB): **Mid 2010s, everyone had completely lost interest in baseball. Nobody cared, except for angry Dodger fans on the internet. So in order to get interest back in the sport, we had to take some drastic measures. We introduced a promotion, where whoever could steal a fighting mecha robot from the secret room under the Pentagon and teach it to play baseball would win the robot a spot as the Yankees’ starting right fielder. And it worked, but only for a while.

**Joe Girardi (2017 Yankees Manager): **You would think people would be more interested in a stolen fighting mecha robot. But no. 

**Rob Manfred: **Nothing else I was doing worked. Everyone thought Giancarlo Stanton was the robot because he was so muscular. Stanton wasn’t the robot. We did a whole thing where if you showed up to a Tigers game in a silly hat you got to pitch. No one had a silly enough hat. There wasn’t enough joy at Tigers games. But we did something else. We put a little juice in the balls.

**Bud Selig (former commissioner, MLB; member, Baseball Hall of Famer): **Manfred called me up on a rainy Tuesday night. It was specifically a dark and stormy night, you know. He said the atmosphere was important. I said, if you needed to talk, you have my email, I’m eating dinner in the Willie Maze labyrinth. He said, you get out of there, how is there even cell service in the Willie Maze labyrinth? So I got out and took his damn call. Didn’t see Willie, though. 

**Joe Girardi: **It was pretty obvious they did something to the ball. I mean, my fighting mecha robot in right field mashed 52 dingers and broke DiMaggio’s rookie record? DiMaggio wasn’t even a robot, that we know of. 

**Rob Manfred: **For the record, first Bud suggested hiding a bunch of people. I did consider hiding Josh Donaldson somewhere creative, because his hair is a blight on major league baseball, but we learned at Harvard Law School that hiding professional baseball players is an intentional tort. So we had a plan. 

**Giancarlo Stanton (outfielder, New York Yankees; currently flexing): **I just like hitting home runs, baby. Chicks dig the long ball, you dig? I dig. 

**Rob Manfred: **You have to understand, it was 1998 all over again. Except we weren’t in the presence of gods. A mere man couldn’t save baseball. A fighting mecha robot stolen from the Pentagon couldn’t save baseball. But the juice…the juice could save baseball. We just had to give it some time. 

**Chapter 2: Juiced **

** _The 2017 playoffs proved that there was something going on with the baseball. Game 5 of the 2017 World Series ended 13-12, Astros over Dodgers, with huge dingers smacked goddamn everywhere. No one knew how powerful the juice would be, but the game went down in baseball history, with many declaring it “the best game of the World Series, except for Game 7 last year in 2016, because of the curse and all”._ **

** _Of course, it later turned out the Astros were cheating in that classic game. Nevertheless, the Commissioner had a plan. _ **

**Mark McGwire (1998 home run champion; 12x All Star; 5x MLB home run leader; not a member, Baseball Hall of Fame): ** When Bud Selig came to me with a request from Rob Manfred, I almost said, I gotta get out of here. I know I said I would never feel any shame for the crimes I committed back then, or the crimes I would commit in the future, but I didn’t expect they would hold me to it. 

**Rob Manfred: **Of course we were going to hold him to it. He wasn’t banned from baseball, like Martin Scorsese was.

**Randy Johnson (photographer; member, Baseball Hall of Fame): **Rob Manfred found me somehow. I don’t know how. I thought, 20 years ago, it had been enough. I was in my backyard taking some photos of birds and Rob stood on my deck and said, “Randy, you have to help us out with a project,” and I said, “I will only help you if it’s a photography project, Rob, I am retired now, you can go to my website to look at my photos,” and Rob said, “if you didn’t want to help us, you shouldn’t have given up that goddamn moonshot to McGwire.”

**Mark McGwire: **But then I thought, maybe now someone will see me as a hero. Baseball is a magic kind of sport. Back in ‘98, I hit a lot of home runs, and Sammy Sosa hit a lot of home runs, and for a while we were heroes, and once, I taught him how to play Nintendo, and then we played together. 

**Rob Manfred: **It was obvious what else we needed. If everyone was going to celebrate me, Rob Manfred, for saving baseball! We needed to juice those balls.

**Mark McGwire: **I thought that Sammy Sosa should help us out, in memory of the Major League Baseball Home Run Chase of 1998. But once he found out Randy was participating, it was a no go.

**Sammy Sosa (1998 NL MVP; 7x All Star; 2x NL home run leader; not a member, Baseball Hall of Fame): **I remember my dead peacock, Judas Iscariot The Bird. I remembered the sound he made when Roger Maris killed him. How he said I was a peacock like him. Randy Johnson killed a bird. It wasn’t my bird, and it wasn’t me, but it could have been my cousin. I destroyed Roger Maris and avenged Judas Iscariot The Bird. But I don’t need to work with Randy Johnson. 

** _Chapter 3: Juiced, Redux_ **

** _2018 proved to be more normal, ball-wise, than 2017. The Red Sox won a World Series based more on the strength of their pitching than their ability to hit dingers. Some superstars switched teams, but for most, free agency dragged on through March. No one knew there was a surprise coming. No one knew. No one knew about the dingers._ **

**Mark McGwire: **Rob Manfred took me to the secret bunker they got that Yankee fighting robot out of, and I sat there, and put a little bit of juice into every ball. Randy Johnson helped me. He wanted to take photos for his new exhibit but Rob Manfred said, “what the fuck are you doing?” and took the camera away.

**Randy Johnson: **I had plans. I thought, this exhibition could make me a real star. We could contrast a photo of Mark McGwire with a steroid needle and a photo of Mark McGwire with a baseball steroid needle. It’s about the passage of time and how things change and how things stay the same. I told Mark this and he said, “I don’t understand this photography thing, Randy, you should go back to giving up those goddamn moonshots to me, ha ha ha.”

**Mark McGwire: **It was funny. I had a bag of trail mix and I was feeling good. It almost felt like I was playing baseball again, back on first base after doing my favorite thing, hitting singles, eating trail mix and sharing trail mix with my enemies. 

**Sammy Sosa: **I did come and watch after a little while, because the ghost of Judas Iscariot The Bird told where the bunker was, and once upon a time Mark McGwire was my friend. Once upon a time we hit home runs together, so many home runs, and once upon a time I got my revenge against Roger Maris and I was happy. When I saw Mark McGwire in that bunker, I gave him a high five. 

**Derek Jeter (owner, Miami Marlins; prooooobably now a member, Baseball Hall of Fame): **It was different once I was an owner and not a player. I realized that there was more to consider than what the fans wanted in their gift baskets, like profit margins, and revenue sharing, and whether or not a whacky home run sculpture is art. So I wasn’t too mad about what Manfred was doing. 

** _Chapter 4: The Season Begins_ **

** _The 2019 baseball season began with a bang. Legends of the sport retired. The Mariners won a bunch of games, which would not continue past May. Every single Yankee player was injured in a freak accident when Aaron Judge hit a baseball with all of his engineered power and it bounced around the stadium, hitting them all in the obliques or hamstrings. Unfortunately, Giancarlo Stanton's injuries lingered, robbing the Bronx of the chance to watch him hit a dinger that might bounce off the top of the 4 train as it went past Yankee Stadium. Other players more than made up for his absence. Justin Verlander’s ERA was low but his HR/9 was high and he subsequently got mad online. In Queens, a polar bear began hitting homers._ **

**Pete Alonso (first baseman, New York Mets): **I started the season in the Arctic League. I was playing pretty well, you know, hitting some iceballs over glaciers, all that fun stuff. And then Brodie van Wagenen found me when he was on an early spring ski trip and signed me to the Mets. There are no glaciers in Queens, but every time I hit a home run, my teammates buy me shaved ice from the concession stand, and it’s almost the same. 

**Brodie van Wagenen (General Manager, New York Mets): ** Look, I’m under price constraints, working as GM of the Mets. This polar bear was destroying the Arctic League. We haven’t been that into analytics here in Queens, but we’re trying to change that. Pete was a good pickup, even if he was a talking bear standing on his hind legs. And he could _ destroy _the ball.

**Rob Manfred: **It was going perfectly. Everything was going according to plan. The Minnesota Twins broke the record for most home runs hit before the All Star Break! The Twins! Look, it’s a little weird that they’re all identical, and their swings are all the same, and they hit every home run with two bats, but it’s grandfathered into MLB rules.

**Bud Selig: **Honestly, I was impressed. It felt like ‘98 all over again. Sure, there were more accusatory articles, reporters wanted to know what was up with the ball, but the people wanted dingers, and Rob gave them dingers. Dingers win over reporters every time. It’s just a fact. 

** _Chapter 5: The Playoffs_ **

** _By the time the 2019 playoffs rolled around, people had gotten much more used to the juiced ball. It helped watching a polar bear break the home run record, and a bunch of scrappy, gritty guys gut out 20 home runs. veryone dug the long ball, except for baseball people on Twitter, and they weren’t a significant revenue base. _ **

** _The Twins beat the A’s in the AL wildcard, setting up another classic Yankees/Twins beatdown. The Washington Nationals finally won a playoff game when Juan Soto hit, of course, a dinger to lead them past the Milwaukee Brewers. The extraordinary had already happened, as well as the expected. _ **

** _And then the hatching began._ **

**Pete Alonso: **The Mets missed the playoffs but I hit 53 home runs. It was nice. After the All Star Break, once the game ended my team made sure they had fresh salmon for me, and berries, and a bucket of ice. But once the regular season was over I went back to the Artic League. There aren’t enough glaciers to hit home runs over in Queens, the baseballs aren’t frozen enough, and the fish is not very fresh, even though my teammates were very kind.

**Brodie van Waganen: **We have big plans for 2020. Scouting in the Arctic League really paid off, plus with new ownership, I think we can start looking in the Art League. Some might criticize and say "same old Mets", but I say you have to think big. Cubism is the new pitching frontier. No, I don't know what they put in the balls, but I sure am glad Pete hit all those home runs. 

**Rob Manfred: **Of course we had difficulty tracking what we injected into the balls. This is Major League Baseball we’re talking about. You think we do anything other than inject first and ask questions later?

**Mark McGwire: **It was the authenticated balls they were going to auction on the internet first. I saw them. The birds were so small, and I wanted to touch them, but Randy Johnson warned me about birds, so I didn’t. The birds were so beautiful. I went to my friend Sammy Sosa, and I brought my Nintendo. I said, “Let’s play Nintendo, Sammy,” and he said, “Look at the birds.”

**Sammy Sosa: **And then, I told Mark McGwire, that this was the end of what we started in ‘98. This was the truth. Roger Maris may have killed Judas Iscariot The Bird, but now all the baseballs are beautiful birds. This is the legacy. I avenged my bird’s death once, and then I avenged it again. My eggs were cube-shaped after I took steroids, but now they are perfect spheres.

**Will Smith (rookie catcher, Los Angeles Dodgers): **Yeah, man, I don’t know anything about any birds? I just know the balls were flying all year, and I could have won Game 5. That ball I hit died at the wall, and then Clayton Kershaw cried once we were eliminated from the playoffs in the divisional series, and everything I knew was wrong. I never want to feel that way again. I would do anything so I never had to feel like that again.

**Randy Johnson: **Of course it was fucking birds. Of fucking course it was the birds. I said to the ghost of Babe Ruth, when I was out reminiscing on an empty baseball field in Texas, alone, “why does it have to be birds? Why can’t I escape the birds?” And he took a drag on his cigar and leaned on his bat and said, “I don’t know, Randy, maybe you shouldn’t have given up all those goddamn moonshots to McGwire.”

**Rob Manfred: **I didn’t know what to do with all the birds, so I asked Bud Selig.

**Bud Selig: **I said, hell, give ‘em to Sammy Sosa. Give ‘em to Martin Scorsese, greatest managers in Cubs history. Give ‘em to the bird people. There’s plenty of bird people out there. Let them deface my statue of me and the unnamed astronaut. At least I got a statue for a little while. They won’t give Rob Manfred a statue.

** _Epilogue: The Offseason, and the Future _**

** _Luckily for baseball, the Astros were caught in a sign-stealing scandal, having been found to use cameras to steal signs through the 2017 season. Several players also signed over a billion dollars worth of free agency contracts before Christmas 2019, setting a different media narrative. While people cared about what happened to the baseballs in the playoffs, Howie Kendrick hit enough dingers to satisfy the D.C. metro area and win the Nationals the World Series. _ **

** _In the years following, the baseball was more normal. MLB had had enough for a few years. McGwire and Sosa were never going to make it into the Hall of Fame, but some of the home run records had an asterix, and there were, for decades after, a truly astounding number of birds on the statue of Bud Selig and the unnamed astronaut, many of them constantly screeching and cawing. _ **

**Joe Girardi: **Oh, I got fired from the Yankees, sure, back in 2017 after the Astros cheated to beat us. Great to find that out after being unemployed. Still tracked down one of the birds and gave it to Judgey. Figure it’s good for a fighting mecha robot to have something to learn to love, so he won’t kill us all. Plus, then he could fight that sonuvabitch ghost of Roger Maris next time he pops up. 

**Justin Verlander: ** I _ knew _there was something MLB wasn’t telling us about the balls. I said on Twitter and everything. 

**Sammy Sosa:** I promised my new birds I would raise them to be happy. And I did, and I will in the future, the next time baseball asks me to help cheat for the good of the game. It's what Judas Iscariot The Bird would want, and it is what I will do. 

**Mark McGwire: **In the end, I wouldn’t say I care much about my legacy. I don’t regret any of what I did. I cared about being back with my muscular friend with ill-gotten biceps, reminding America that baseball is a magical sport and that occasionally, anything can happen. The Washington Nationals can win not just a playoff series, but the World Series. One man can hit dingers all over the United States, and everyone cheers and is happy. I got to play Nintendo with my friend Sammy Sosa again. And, sometimes, Randy Johnson was there. 

**Author's Note:**

> aaron judge is prooooobably not a fighting mecha robot stolen from the pentagon.
> 
> randy johnson did, actually, hit a bird with a pitch, and is now very into photography in his retirement. it's on his (locked, but with 50k followers) instagram, which i could not bring myself to request.
> 
> what's going on with the baseball in major league baseball? [we don't know! but it's a thing!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juiced_ball_theory#Late_2010s)
> 
> this really went off the rails and honestly, ended up much more about birds than originally planned. i hope it was fun. 
> 
> this was also deeply weird to tag, and i did have to make the manfred and selig tags, but you know: worth it. the funniest lines in here are absolutely lifted from clickhole; again, all credit to their great article for being such a fun read and inspiration.


End file.
